The volume is about the preservation of the tangible remains from the past in the socialist states between the end of World War II, 1945, and the fall of the Iron Curtain in the years around 1990. The term “heritage” does not refer to the material structures but is applied as an analytical category, still an unconventional approach to heritage in the region. The papers explore how heritage was conceptualized and created, that is, the discourses and processes through which heritage emerged and the actors it involved, following the approach of critical heritage studies.
The book is a result of collaboration between the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, and other institutions in Germany. The contributors represent a broad range of disciplines. The papers cover the socialist era of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bohemia (at that time in Czechoslovakia), the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the Soviet Union, with two studies zooming in to the level of Soviet republics: Ukraine and Estonia. The way heritage was conceptualized in these states was, above all, defined by the official socialist ideology: monuments were considered a resource to build a better—communist—future, and they were to be used in the service of cultural, economic, and social development. Their interpretation and strategies of management, however, and ultimately what heritage was, emerged in the interactions of a broad variety of actors as demonstrated by the case studies: state authorities, experts, and expert institutions in the heritage sector and other related areas, such as tourism, culture, and education, the broad public, locals and visitors, international organizations, foreign—socialist and western—specialists and their networks. The volume challenges the stereotypes of exclusively top-down, centrally dictated processes in the Eastern Bloc and the isolation from the western world.
The papers are grouped in two parts. Those in the first part, “Transfers and Exchanges in Heritage Policies and Practices,” demonstrate how socialist conceptualizations of heritage were dynamic constructs also influential at the international level both behind and across the Iron Curtain. The second part, “Canonizing and Contesting the Past: Heritage, Place, and Belonging under Socialism,” “shifts the analysis onto specific sites and discourses on the ground,” according to the editors (19). Still, all eight contributions switch back and forth between the local, national, and international, presenting sites as case studies and their broader ideological, national, and international political and economic context.
The main argument of the volume is that socialist discourse was part of an international discourse: experts participated in international networks within and beyond the Eastern Bloc, including large organizations such as UNESCO and ICOM, and actively contributed to their policies. Julia Röttjer's case study on the nomination and acceptance of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the postwar city center of Warsaw into the UNESCO World Heritage list demonstrates how socialist conceptualizations of heritage shaped the international policy discourse and what was accepted as heritage value there. Karin Hallas-Murula and Kaarel Truu explore how the travels and professional interactions of specialists within and outside the Eastern Bloc influenced conservation practice in Estonia, using the experts’ mandatory travel reports submitted to the KGB and recent interviews as sources. The national heritage canon in Ukraine is the focus of the paper by Iryna Sklokina, who traces its emergence and transformation through negotiations between political actors in Moscow and Kyiv, managers and guides in tourism, and foreign visitors, primarily Ukrainian emigrants from socialist and western countries.
Strengthening national culture was a key element in socialist ideology, and the material remains of the past had an important role in the socialist nation-building process. The postwar reconstruction of the former Royal Palace complex in Budapest discussed by Eszter Gantner represented an ideological problem as a remnant of the feudal past and a symbol of national independence. Changing ideas about the new function of the complex and the selective preservation of the material remains ranging from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century also reflected how ideologies about the role of culture, heritage, and national history in the socialist state transformed over the decades. Nele-Hendrikje Lehmann demonstrates how the GDR developed a future-oriented interpretation of prewar heritage that could meaningfully integrate the all-German past while contributing to a distinct identity of the socialist state. Local and regional heritage is the focus of Čenĕk Pýcha's paper: a small town, Duchcov, where the authorities appropriated the new socialist heritage discourse to control the impact of the mining industry over the town.
Looking into the nuances of the socialist heritage definition is one of the major values of this volume. The papers convincingly demonstrate that heritage experts addressed issues similar to their colleagues outside the Iron Curtain and were parts of a global discourse contributing to the theoretical and practical processes that took the field where it is today. Their activity has, however, been marginalized, or even forgotten within the international discourse from the 1990s—and also within the region. The political changes evoked in the former socialist states a heavily critical attitude toward all intellectual processes in the preceding decades and a desire for the experts to “catch up” with the western trends. The work done by the authors and editors of the volume contributes to the decolonization of the heritage field, which is still characterized by isolation, on the one hand, and the import of western epistemological models, on the other. The case studies, for example, on Hungary and Ukraine demonstrate that without going back to the socialist roots, one cannot understand entirely why and how heritage is (mis)used today by populist governments and in conflict situations.
Specialists in heritage studies dedicated to decolonizing the academic discourse will find the contributions inspiring. The volume, however, also offers a new insight into the cultural and political history of the region through analyzing the heritage domain. The papers can be incorporated into university coursework as case studies in East European Studies and in heritage studies to demonstrate the application of actor-network and discourse analysis.
